Egyptian Religious Background
Presented on: Tuesday, April 2, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 16 of 54
Egyptian Religious Background
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, April 2, 1985
Transcript:
The most difficult thing to understand is Egyptian religion. So, we're going to just take tonight to brush lightly over the Egyptian base, and then next week we'll take up the Greco-Egyptian religion, the amalgamation - for want of a better word - immediately of the Greek and the Egyptian. So, we're just going to brush over Egyptian religion, and then next week we'll go right to the development of the Greek-Egyptian synthesis.
I thought I'd start us off by giving you a short description of embalming. Embalming was a highly skilled profession whose practitioners were a mixture of surgeon and priest. First, they wash the body with water from the Nile, then through a slit in the left side made with a flint knife the organs were all removed except for the heart, which was required for the judgment weighing and to have the heart weighed. The most vulnerable parts were separately mummified and placed in four canopic jars in a solution of natron and aromatic spices. Generally, these jars were all about eight to twelve inches high, usually with the heads of various gods - Anubis and so forth. And there were always four of them, and they were placed under the crypt under what is mislabeled as sarcophagus. Sarcophagus, technically, is the Greek word meaning eater of flesh. And when bodies were put into limestone crypts, the limestone ate the flesh away. So, a sarcophagus ate the body. So, you don't want to think that it was a sarcophagus? It was really a coffin.
Natron, which is a sodium-based mineral native to Egypt, and aromatic spices. The jars were then sealed with carved stoppers. Up to the end of the 18th dynasty, these stoppers took the form of human heads, probably in the likeness of the dead person, and then after that there were animal heads. The stomach was protected by the jackal-headed god and the goddess Neith. The intestines by the falcon-headed god, and the lungs by the ape-headed god and Nephthys. Finally, the liver by the human-headed Imsety. And, Isis, the goddess of Philae. The brain was removed either through the nose by breaking the ethmoid bone, or through the ear. The brain and body cavities were then washed out with palm wine, and other astringents, such as cedar oil, were used to dissolve any residue. It is not clear if the kidneys were left in the body. They were not. Or what happened to the brain? The brain was kept in solution, but all the organs and materials were kept and buried in the vicinity of the tomb or in the tomb itself. It was essential that nothing should be lost that belonged to the body. The empty body cavities were now packed with natron, a compound of sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate, which dehydrated the body efficiently and acted in addition as a preservative.
Incidentally, you can see a mummy, you can actually touch it at the [Los Angeles] County Museum of Natural History - you can go and actually touch one. Seventy days it took to dry - seventy days. And of course, during all of this embalming, it was a ritual that was accompanied by intoned hymns so that each stage was articulated. Then came after seventy days the most elaborate part of the embalmer's art, which was the bandaging. This started with the extremities. Each finger and each toe was separately wrapped and frequently encased with finger and toe stalls of gold or silver. Penis was wrapped in a state of erection. During the bandaging prayers from the Book of the Dead, read by the priests, ointments, spices, and resins were poured on the bandages. After all this, then the forearms were bandaged. Then the upper arms which were folded, then across the chest, and everything bound in that position between layers of bandages, and were placed a great variety of precious objects, rings, bracelets, and so forth.
This is why most of the mummies were desecrated by robbers because the valuables were interlaced within the bandages. When the bandaging was finished, then the whole body was wrapped in shrouds. And these were fastened with four transverse bands. One, two, three, four. This is one of the most archaic symbols of wholeness, which transcends death. And this cover here of this new book, Esotericism and Symbol by R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz. You will see the four bands crossing this little container here. Also, I don't have it right at hand, if you see the yell at late Hellenistic gods like Mithras, who was a lion-headed man wrapped around with a serpent. There are four bands of the serpent there. In the Greek-Orphic esoteric tradition, the Protogonos God had incarnate as a man who had four bands crossing him, so that the body then has this. The high priest pronounced the final benediction. You live again - you live again forever. Here you are, young once more forever.
The mummy was then placed in an Osiris shaped coffin. That is, the whole coffin itself was shaped like the god Osiris, so that then one is encased by the god. One is ritually wrapped not only with wrappings and your valuables, but with the words of the ritual. It's a laying on of words and a laying on of ointments and bandages in a certain set order. Then all of this is delivered over to the god Osiris. Osiris-shaped coffin and then taken to the tomb of friends, relatives, officiating priests stopping for prayer at a temple or temples on the way. So, this is the general physical layout. Probably the first structure that we need to pay attention to tonight is the fact that Osiris was a complement to the god, whose name is usually Rei or Ra.
The E in Egyptian didn't exist, and so it was a guttural realized, and it came out something like R-A. It's a very, very short D so that it becomes almost an A round - Ra. He is the God of the upper part - the upper circle of life - and the lower half of it is held by Osiris. So that the two together form a complete cycle. And Osiris is the netherworld, the underworld. And Ra is the upper world. One gives the gift of life, the other gives the gift of rebirth - life again. So, they're related, and they're related by the continuity of life. Or as we will have to distinguish, since we're going to be using the term life opposite of death, life and death, we have to understand that eternal life is probably more easily described as a continuous presence - continuous presence. This is what is divine. The continuous presence. Life and death are cycles within the continuous presence. They are objectively discontinuous episodes in themselves. Life as an episode comes to death. Death as an episode comes back to life. This discontinuity is only apparent. The continuity is ensured by the divine presence, which never changes, and thus is what we would call eternal. It's not timeless, but it's eternal. It never has not been what it is now, at this very moment.
This is the most difficult thing to understand - that the Egyptians were extraordinarily sophisticated, but they were monotheistic from the beginning. But their monotheism was upon an invisible unity of the continuity of divine presence that cannot be named. Therefore, one is free to make up infinite names and infinite combinations. Whose arrangement - the combinations whose arrangement will indicate the presence of the divine. This is the main issue in Egyptian religion; very difficult to come by. The reason for this - both Judaism and Christianity leveled attacks against the Egyptian religion because the primal Egyptian religious experience was, to use a colloquial phrase, stiff competition because both Judaism and Christianity had gained tremendous insights from Egyptian religions.
It's important for us to realize that Egyptian religion was African. It was not Asian. It was not European. And that as far back as we can tell, even back to the Pyramid Texts, 3000 BC, the Egyptian religion was already developed, already sophisticated, which means that before Egypt was there, the religious insight was matured. And since it did not come full blown and become developed in Egypt itself it must have come from the Sahara Desert regions before they were too sophisticated, and it must have been developed through millennia there. It's a very sophisticated religion. Its basic premise, if we can use this kind of logical language for a moment with your permission. Its basic premise is that God is a unity, but man's capacities are only in the multiple realms. So that what man needs most is order; he needs a sense of order because he, by necessity, has to deal with multiplicity. But the prime axiomatic basis for his order must be that it leads to unity.
Now you can understand that the whole Egyptian outlook is towards a geometry of me. Man has to have a sense of order, and that sense of order must eventually lead him towards unity. Thereby, for the Egyptians, one is a unity and not a number in some sequence. The first unity in the Egyptian religion is three. One is not an integration; it is beyond any kind of manipulation, beyond any kind of question. So that it's that unity is not accessible to language, not accessible to man's mind. He may not cognize it objectively; he may not recognize it mentally. Therefore, it is a perpetual mystery. It is a constant mysteriousness. The earliest Egyptian phrase for this mysteriousness is what they call a triliteral, a three-vowel word. Which in English phonetic transcription turns out to be N-T-R. And the early Egyptian dictionary maker E. A. Wallace Budge put two E's in between so it could be pronounced "NEETR." But actually, it's NTR and that was the name given to the "Continuous Divine Presence."
Now, if you sound that out for yourself, you sound - the T in it marks a transition. The tongue which has been on the roof of the mouth for the - in the end it lets go, the letting go, and then her. The N and the R are related. What makes them different is that the tongue has let go. That the tongue has no longer magnetized itself to the top of the roof of the mouth but is free in the mouth. This was a mysterious way of indicating that the Continuity of the Divine Presence is a mystery that occurs to man only in a transition, so that transitions become very important in Egyptian mysticism. And to the Egyptian mind, every single detail counted. Without the picayune attentiveness to the T'. The N' and the R' would just not make sense. Not that it makes sense intellectually, not that it makes sense allegorically, but that experientially one gets used to the fact that there is a sense of order for man, which comes from the real.
So here this is very difficult to appreciate. It seems that we grasp it intellectually. But very, very difficult. The hieroglyph - the hieroglyphic sign for ntr was an axe head with an axe handle. In the earliest Egyptian texts, there was a crisscross on the axe head, which evidently were thongs holding the stone axe head to the wooden handle. Later on, when metallurgy developed, the thong disappear. People used to say, well, maybe this is a flag on a stick or something else, but it's an accident. The image of the axe head is for strength. Strong power. Power. This power has the capacity to continue beyond a transition which marks its phases. So that the order with successive phases, which are different in themselves, is held by an underflow of continual renewal. In fact, the renewal is so accurate that it seems like a continuity.
This is the nature of the divine to the Egyptian religious psyche as far back as anyone can tell. There never was a time that the Egyptians did not have the sophisticated understanding. And as far as we know, archaeologically, it came from the development of the central Sahara, some 6000 BC or 7000 BC, perhaps, and diffused not only towards Egypt, but south from the Sahara. So that by earliest historical times this was an established fact it gave to Egyptian religion. By the time other cultures were coming into Egypt, taking over Egypt, the Persians, and eventually the Babylonians, eventually the Greeks, and so forth. It gave them the sense that Egypt was eternally what it is. Which was very accurate. It never did ever change except that the external circumstances changed. The psychic manifestations change.
Now, one of the curious things about the Egyptian sense of order is its ability to hold on to one or two essential truths and to grasp the continuity of those essential truths through all the vicissitudes. In a book which has just recently come out - this was published by MIT in 1972 and reprinted by Dover last year - called Mathematics in the Time of the Pharaohs. A very curious thing about mathematics. He [Richard J. Gillings] says one of the oddities in Egyptian mathematics was they developed an ability to calculate two thirds of any number. They could find two thirds of any number. And they made many, many multiple ways of achieving this. This gave them a very peculiar sense of mathematics and added to it they had the ability to have a complete twice-times table, a doubling of all expressions.
This the author Richard Gillings relates if we accept that the Egyptians "had a high degree of civilization" expressed especially in their mathematical skill, "it will [surely] come as a great surprise to the readers of this history to find that whatever great heights the ancient Egyptians have achieved scientifically, their mathematics was based on two very elementary concepts. The first was their complete knowledge of the twice-times table, and the second, their ability to find two thirds of any number, whether integral or fractional. Upon these two very simple foundations, the whole structure of Egyptian mathematics was erected, as we will see in the following pages."
And in chapter four he goes into the two-thirds table for fractions and he notes, "The one remarkable exception to the fractions with unit numerators was two-thirds, which was written by a special sign," which looks like a Greek gamma in hieratic and then in hieroglyphic, it looks like the word for R, looks like the hieroglyphic sign for the sound R, with two lines coming down, one of them about half the length of the other. "The scribes use this fraction so freely as an operator in their multiplications and divisions that one is led to believe... that they must have used prepared tables - much of which they probably knew by heart, as they did there twice-times table. This two-thirds table was so much a part of the scribes stock-in-trade that, [were he] required to find..." When he was "required to find one third of a number, he would [first] find two-thirds of it, and then have his answer, instead of simply dividing by three. This technique was so ingrained that we find it actually being used for such simple operations as finding one-third of 3 and one-third of 1."
Now this seems to be odd, a real peculiarity until we understand that. One unity cannot be counted. You can count two and you can count three. And two is about as primordial as you can get. So, the two-thirds was what man could religiously hope to understand. The other one third is a permanent mystery. Namely the first one-third of anything. It's a religious tipping of the hat to the fact that there's an ineffable element everywhere, and the ineffable element is always the unity of the whole. So that Egyptians became extraordinarily facile in their minds as expressed in their mathematics, in their geometry, in their religion, with portioning out fractions of unity. And when you see some human being with a soft head or some Horus bird with a human head, this figure is like a fraction. Instead of saying it's 3/16, it's a human head over horse. It's a thought head over a human. These are fractions of the divine unity which cannot be imaged.
So, when you bring an arrangement of these fractions together, as in a funeral service, isn't that part of the funeral service which was most poignant called the, in Greek called, psychostasia, the weighing of the soul, the weighing of the heart. The archetypal collection of these God figures who are part animal and part human are like the equations, the mathematical equations, of all the fractions that can be known gathered around this event. And that's as close as man can come to describing, to uttering what is really happening. And while his mind is exactly attentive to every little detail, his spiritual sense is completely open for the mystery that he cannot ever say.
So, the Egyptians have a very, very peculiar sense of religious attentiveness. They might well have been the most religious civilization ever to exist. Nothing was done, ever, without this religious attentiveness, so that Egyptian daily life, Egyptian history, has a quality of eternality to it running all the way through. And because any change, any incursion from other people is simply seen as new fractions to add to their sense of equation the Egyptians never had to change their spiritual minds - they could work anything out and they did.
Even in the third and fourth centuries AD the Egyptian people were still wrapping mummies. Many early Christian saints in Alexandria had to specifically say in their will that they did not want to be mummified. This is a very, very peculiar notion. And I know it sounds simple at first, but it's hard to keep it in mind. The earliest description that we have of the Egyptian religion by someone who was not an Egyptian priest, was Plutarch and his work, his larger work here is called Moralia. It's in 16 volumes like this, and in volume five of the Moralia is his book on Isis and Osiris. Plutarch lived in the first century AD. He was a priest of the Egyptian mysteries, and he could understand a great deal. He was Hellenistic, highly educated.
He writes this [Moralia, Book 5, "Isis and Osiris"]: "The Pythagoreans embellished also numbers and figures with the appellation of the gods. The equilateral triangle they called Athena, born from the head and third-born because it is divided by three perpendiculars drawn from its three angles. The number one they called Apollo because of its rejection of plurality and because of the singleness of unity. The number two they called Strife,' [and Daring,'] and [number] three they called Justice,' for [although] the doing of injustice and suffering from injustice are caused by deficiency and excess..."
"If, then, the most noted of the philosophers, observing the riddle of the Divine in inanimate and incorporeal objects, have not thought it proper to treat anything with carelessness or disrespect, even more do I think that, in all likelihood, we should welcome those peculiar properties existent in natures which possess the power of perception and have a soul and feeling and character. It is not that we should honour these, but that through these we should honor the Divine, since they are the clearer mirrors of the Divine by their nature also, so that we should regard them as the instrument or device of the God who orders all things. And in general we must hold it true that nothing inanimate is superior to what is animate, and nothing without the power of perception is superior to that which has that power - no, not even if one should heap together all the gold and emeralds in the world. The Divine is not engendered in colours, or in forms or in polished surfaces, but whatsoever things have no share in life, things whose nature does not allow them to share therein, have a portion of less honour than that of the dead. But the nature that lives and sees and has within itself the source of movement and a knowledge of what belongs to it and what belongs to others, has drawn to itself and efflux and portion of beauty from the Intelligence by which the universe is guided'... Wherefore the Divine is no worse represented in these animals than in works of bronze and stone which are alike subject to destruction and disfiguration, and by their nature are void of all perception and comprehension. This, then, is what I most approve in the accounts that are given regarding the animals held in honour..."
"As for the robes, those of Isis are variegated in their colours; for her power is concerned with matter which becomes everything and receives everything, light and darkness, day and night, fire and water, life and death, beginning and end. But the robe of Osiris has no shading or variety in its colour, but only one single colour like to light. For the beginning is combined with nothing else, and that which is primary and conceptual is without admixture; wherefore, when they have once taken off the robe of Osiris, they lay it away and guard it, unseen and untouched. But the robes of Isis they used many times over; for in use those things are perceptible and ready at hand afford many disclosures of themselves and opportunities to view them as they are changed about in various ways. But the apperception of the conceptual, the pure, and the simple, shining through the soul like a flash of lightning, affords an opportunity to see and touch it but once."
The arrangement of the material world to the Egyptian religious mind had to be, according to rote, had to be according to rote order because that rote order was your only guide, your only insurance, that you were going to lead yourself in your life to a moment where the Divine could be seen that would occur but once. In order for that propitiousness to occur, one had to have everything right. The importance of the form was not the form, but that the form be exact. So, what it would disclose, because it would only do that once, would be disclosed in a way that you could experience it, that you could receive it. The key to life was feminine was in Isis. Life is variegated. It has infinite possibilities of color and variety. And all of it must be received, whatever it is.
Who knows what you're going to receive in this life? Who knows what experiences are going to come out even with the most carefully laid plans, the most secure societies. So, the goddess of life has to be able to receive everything, and part of her blessedness is that she teaches us to receive whatever is going on, whatever has happened or is going to happen with equanimity because it's the equanimity of receiving all the variation that allows us to keep preparing our form of the whole for that moment when the Divine will be disclosed.
It's like a very touchy camera. That the shutter is only going to work once. You're only going to have one photograph. You've got to know how to set up that shot. You've got to know everything about the camera, everything about photography, everything about the scene. You've got to be ready for that moment. This is a peculiarity, and this is where the one and the many are brought together in Egyptian religion and in the psychostasia.
What forth brings to the soul is not a book. It's not writing. It's nothing more esoteric than this. The Egyptian sistrum was shaped rather like an ovoid-type of a shape that had four bands running through it - steel or metal or bronze bands - that when you shook, shook a sistrum, it would make a kind of a sound like that cacophony sound. This is a Tibetan Vajrayana version of that. A bell makes a purified sound, a sistrum disturbs the hearing order. No longer tune your ears to what you can hear. Tune your ears out. What you cannot hear is what is going to be said. So, the sistrum is a divine instrument to break the spell of this world. It's only when we're awakened in this way. It's as if we're under a spell in this world. And part of the sense of order, of the inculcation of the same order that goes for thousands of years, is to make it easy for you to leave that order behind.
Budge's book on Egyptian Magic, observes that, "Egyptian magic dates from the time when the predynastic and prehistoric dwellers in Egypt believed that the earth, [and] the underworld, [and] the air, [and] the sky were peopled with countless beings, visible and invisible, which were held to be friendly, unfriendly [et cetera according] to man, according [as] the operations of nature."
So that life is filled with infinite hierarchies of existence. One would have to be quite arrogant indeed, to feel that you were able to keep track of everything and all the millions of levels. So, one cannot aggressively project the ordering out into this complete cacophony of possibilities. The order must be applied to oneself. And so, the integrity of the individual and Egyptian religion was always taking care that one's own self was ordered. And it's the ordering of one's own self, was the epitome of the wisdom of Egyptian religion. This is the original meaning of being hermetically sealed. No matter what is going on in the world - visible or invisible, on whatever level - if I am comporting myself with regularity and order, I am sealed against the interference, I am guaranteed my moment before the divine, and if I am ready to commit myself openly, deliver my car with no regrets and no strings attached, the divine will receive me. Unity will be there and the presence which is continuous will occur for me also. But that continuous presence ensures the fact that I will live again. It has more power than the discontinuities. So that I may live again. And it's not so much live again and again. It's a different idea, but live again, permanently. This is the NTR that the axe had indication. The closest symbol that the Egyptians came physically to the unity was the sun - Ra. Is it a different sun that comes up every day? That's the same sun. Very same sun. But later on, when they used the term Amon-ra, Amon is not at all related to the word that Akhnaton used for the one God revealed by the face of the sun. That word was Aten, but Amon means hidden. Amon-Ra is the hidden god' who ensures the continuity of that sun's cycle. And part of the insurance of the continuity is that Ra is complemented by Osiris. And so, Amon-Ra and his hiddenness isn't Osiris phenomenon. So, it came as no surprise to the Egyptians that when the world cycle in which they developed was ended and they were good enough at mathematical computation and cosmological speculation they understood. It made sense to them that the ancient Egyptian tradition now was coming through a transition point. That whole age was over, and a new age was beginning. And so when Christianity came in, they recognized in Christ, Osiris. And to them it was part of the same tradition it was just that now the invisible was going to be visible and the visible was going to be invisible. It was Osiris now that was going to be visible. And it was Ra now who was going to be invisible.
The two halves had just turned over and I thought, this is totally appropriate for a new world epoch when they embrace Christianity with absolutely no doubts whatsoever. European mind because it cannot understand the continuity of the Egyptian line. One might almost say here, and I think this is well taken. The African line has continuity. The formulas will change, but the underlying continuity does not change. What is there to change? The Greeks never understood this. It never occurred to them that this was real. They thought that they will educate the Egyptians. They will teach them history. They'll teach them philosophy. And the Egyptians were very glad to learn because they had 500 histories and 2000 philosophies, and they were curious to add a few more, but it made absolutely no difference to them. It was just more fractions to add to the wealth of expressive means by which man positions himself. To be at one with the all' with the divine. This is from Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion. He's been talking about how each individual, political, or geographical area had its own gods. And as you went from the small rural areas into the larger geographical areas, there were gods then for that geography. And as you went to larger ones, there were new and more. And so, there was a proliferation, like grassroots, like every square inch of Egypt had its own particular divinity. And as you went up in an ascending order, more and more land, there were more and more gods. And so, it was an infinite pyramid from multiplicity towards unity. And it didn't bother the Egyptians at all that one might have millions of gods. It was just proof positive of the vitality of the Divine - the unity.
So, Frankfurt said, "We shall have to concentrate on what appear to have been the main religious preoccupation - sometimes the religious obsessions - of a highly civilized people. And we shall find that it is possible to view the monstrous as well as the profound in Egyptian religion - with amazement perhaps, but also with respect. It will appear, moreover, that the Egyptian doctrines are not without coherence. They were rooted in a single basic conviction, conviction, to wit, that the universe is essentially static."
That is, with unity was without movement. Not a negative concept and neither positive nor negative. "The Egyptian held that he lived in a changeless world." Change this world that actually, in reality, unity never was other than what it was, but that as long as he was human and temporal he was deceived. He thought that change might be the context within which he should regard the divine. And then he realized that this was a mental interpretation and therefore he structured his mental order even more stringently to forbid himself this illusion.
So, "The Egyptian held that he lived in a changeless world. It is irrelevant that his view, whether it be applied to nature or to society, seems untenable to us. What matters is that the Egyptian held it, [and] that it informed not only his theology but also his moral and political philosophy. Not as an articulate doctrine, but nevertheless decisively, it determined the forms he gave to his state and his society, to his literature and his art. In fact, we have recognized the Egyptian's view of the world only through the study of those forms." And he says, "It is true, of course, that Egyptian beliefs were in themselves subject to change," but the truth was not subject to change.
This became extremely difficult to appreciate, especially in the 19th century European mind. And you have to remember now that Egyptology started with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and Champollion's discovery that hieroglyphics could be read. Schwaller de Lubicz writes, "It is impossible for cerebral intelligence to conceive an abstraction without defining it by a concrete image. But here we must be aware of distinguishing moments of cerebral intelligence from moments of intelligence-of-the-heart. We will return to this later. The origin of the universe being one single and unique source of energy, there is, owing to this common paternity, a communion among all things in the world."
To the Egyptian religious line. This was a very real, electrifying current of realization that we are physically related in a family way to all of the things of this world. The animals were not somewhat monstrous. They were a part of our nature. The minerals were a part of our nature. The plants are a part of our nature. We are a part of them. So, there's this fine level of communion, communion among all things.
"The origin of the universe being one single and unique source of energy, there is, owing to this common paternity, a communion among all things in the world. There is a kinship between a certain mineral and a plant and an animal and a man." That is, at this stage in our life, there may be certain plants that are more affine than others. There may be certain minerals that are more affine to us than others. So, the Egyptians were free metaphysically to explore the relationships in the world. This is why their pharmacology was superior to any other peoples in the world. This is why their domestication of animals very, very early. "They are linked by being of the same nature,' because in the final analysis, there is only a simple series of basic characteristics whence, by combinations, innumerable possibilities emerge." And these can be classified into various groups and families and so forth.
The affinities between species are not on the basis of cerebral intelligence. There on the basis of what Schwaller de Lubicz calls an intelligence-of-the-heart'. There's an insight being which man, if he opens himself up in the right way, will learn from those things, from the plants. They will tell him what we are good for. The minerals will tell him what we can be used for. It's this vocabulary of the intelligence-of-the-heart' that prepares man to cognize the divine. He can't think about the divine. The mind will never conceive of it. So, he has to train this intelligence-of-the-heart'. He has to train himself to be open to this affinity, to this harmony. And when he learns the vocabulary of enough of the levels of creation, he will then have an approximate language of affinity with the real. This is why the weighing of the heart after death. It's not the weight of the heart in ounces. It's its comprehensiveness to cognize the divine.
De Lubicz writes, "The variable moment, therefore, is of an abstract order, but can be perfectly well observed and analyzed in its effects. On the other hand, the abstract cause in a state of genesis within the concrete - and apparently stable - scheme of man's organic constitution, is beyond rational analysis. A totality of purely bodily experiences evidently maintains this genesis, but individual and group heredity play a part as well. Here again, one can speak of physiological adaptations transmitted by heredity, but the impulse toward this genesis must nevertheless [still] be provided by an incomprehensible moment which, in sum, could be called formless concentration."
This is unfortunate use of language, but it has to be formless concentration'. We've all heard of single-pointedness of mind. This is a no-pointedness of mind. In fact, instead of using the polarity consciousness of form and formless, it would be better here in the Egyptian mode to speak of form and presence, for form and formlessness are polarities. They're in conflict. But when one is experiencing from a sense of unity, the contrast is not one of polarization between form and formlessness, but one of complementation between form and presence. One can arrange an ordered form, but one cannot handle presence. One can only hope that one has made the temple of the body pure, the temple of one's life pure, so that the presence will flow through it and bless it by its inhabitants. This was the archetypal basis of health in the Egyptian-influenced classical world.
Give you a short example just to posit this for you. Asclepius is an Egyptian healing phenomenon. And the temples of Asclepius, healed by having people sleep in the sacred precincts overnight. There wasn't anything that you could do. There was nothing you could take. It was exposing oneself to the influence of the God in his own sacred precinct, and the willingness to open oneself to this exposure. It was the presence, the divine presence, that was healing. And what did it restore? It restored vitality to the form because form and presence belong together cosmically and naturally. And form and formlessness is a false polarity engendered by the mind, and that is what makes you sick.
He writes further. Just two more quotations from him, then I'll go on from this. What we're looking for here, keep in mind, is that the Egyptians are preparing themselves constantly for a moment of grace. They want to arrange everything so that when that moment comes, they can leave everything behind. Everything is ordered all the time. Everything is tidied up all the time so that at any moment, who knows when you're going to die. And it's that moment of death that is your opportunity. Now something interesting here. Remember we talked about how Ra and Osiris are complements of the same unity. Osiris of the underworld. Ra of the overworld, where Ra comes down and just before he translates into Osiris, there's a transition point. The transition point is at dusk and at dawn. Not only dusk and dawn, but the horizon. The Egyptian religions always talking about horizons. Those horizontal, that horizontal circle, is feminine. This cycle vertically is a masculine manifestation. This cycle horizontally is a feminine manifestation. This is why Isis has a sister, Nephthys - the two women, the two sisters, they are sisters. Together, they search out the fragments of Osiris and reinstate him to wholeness. Isis is like the horizon of the dawn, and Nephthys is like the horizon of dusk guaranteeing that that whole horizon guarantees that the transition will be like that sacred Egyptian word for divinity that we talked about at the beginning - the ntr.
And more and more it came to be seen that the functioning relational principle in reality was the feminine guarantee that the transition happened in such a way that continuity was still accessible. The continuity was there, but it had to be to man accessible. So, the divine Mother aspect comes very much into play, especially in that dawn horizontal transformation. And this is why the dawn horizontal manifested as Isis gave birth and gave birth to now an all-encompassing transcendental unity called Horus - Horus, the son of Isis. And it's interesting that in the religious iconography in the religious ritual that Isis is impregnated by Osiris after he is dead - after he is dead. Remember now that they, when they bandaged the mummies, men, masculine mummies, even the penis was bandaged in an erect state because the essence of Osiris was not his sperm, which was a physical material thing, but his essence was a spiritual continuity. So that Horus is not a son of materiality, of physicality, but is a spiritual son. And in fact, the portrayals of Isis becoming impregnated shows that her arms have become wings. And in fact, the whole esotericism of it, the lifting of the penis is not done by desire but is done by the fluttering of the wings of the spirit. Because what is being coaxed out is not semen but is a spiritual essence. It is the spiritual essence of Osiris. And so, Horus is the divine child of the spirit so that when the sun comes up, not only is it Ra - as in Ra and Osiris - but it has that extra mystical overlay.
Now it is the Eye of Horus. And whenever they built a huge complex from Luxor to Philae, those huge main gateways on the lintel going in was the wings of Horus and the sun in between the two wings that became one of the great religious symbols. And comes down even to our own day. And it was, incidentally, the basic symbol for the Rosicrucians. One can still see in the early Pennsylvania tombstones the disk of the sun with the wings, and usually it's embellished. In that late date, some 4000 years after it happened usually there might be a face put on the sun so that it looks like a cherub or something like that. But what that is, what that basic iconography is, is this is the bird of man's spirit freed to the universe. The bird of the largest comprehension. It's not a change in the divinity, but it's a maturation in the mythological capacity of man to express what he feels. It's not so much an increase of what he knows. He still knows that he doesn't know. And in that sense, it's changeless. But he feels more, there's more of a, there's more of a passion. And so, it was a very simple transition to see the Virgin Mary as Isis and to see Christ as Horus. Yeah, Jesus is like Osiris, but the Christ, the Christos, there's a transcendental being has nothing to do with physicality anymore but has everything to do with universal manifestation. That man has a cosmic capacity to manifest. And as long as he didn't recognize that, as long as he didn't really believe in that, as long as he didn't passionately insist that this was his true nature, he was deluded, encaged, and bestial.
And when he came to realize that he was then freed, freed to be himself. De Lubicz writes, "At the level of the human animal, all [the] possibilities of [the] evolution of material consciousness are exhausted. It then becomes a question whether either of a physical continuity [(the legend of the Wandering Jew)] or of a new baptism of spirit, allowing the original radiance to reliberate itself from matter, all experiences exhausted, meaning no further selection is to be made in the materialization of this radiance: it is received into its universality."
This universality becomes symbolized later on by Pentecost. As long as man is a physical limitation, he can only speak the languages that his mind has learned but when he has a spiritual liberation, he can speak in any tongue, not only just all the tongues that human beings could ever talk in, but in all the languages that there are in the universe. All languages become a facility for his expressiveness. This is why the sudden explosion, the sudden jump of cosmic potential. One can only call such a man a God-man. It is the name of the god that is important in this sentence. The name is not a defining but a manifesting power. And because this is true of unity, all language then has this responsibility to order itself, so that at any time one could immediately lightning-like, open up and intuit the divine through any language structure. This is why the Egyptian language and we...
Now, I finally got funds to get us an Egyptian Grammar by Gardiner. You can look at it. That's why the Egyptian language was a sacred language. There was never a common written script. Don't do that. They knew that language is so important as a spiritual possibility for manifestation. It has to keep its divine capacity at all times because it's the insurance of our ordering. It's the insurance that everything is made sacred, that the Holy Order is still operating.
One more thing, and then we'll then we'll be finished. This is on Horus. Remember now that Amon Ra, the hidden Amon is called the one-of-one. Or as it's written in Egyptian, just one one. Not one-one, but one one. No comma, no semicolon, just one one. A title which has been explained as having no reference whatever to the unity of God as understood in modern times. But unless these words are intended to express the idea of unity, what is their meaning? It is also said that he is without second. Thus, there is no doubt that whatever the Egyptians declared their god to be one, and without a second, they meant precisely what Hebrews and Arabs meant when they declared their God to be one. Such a god was an entirely different being from the personifications of the powers of nature, and the existences which, for want of a better name, have been called gods.
But besides rather existed, in very early times a god called Horus whose symbol was the hawk, which it seems was the first living thing worshipped by the Egyptians. Horus was a sun god like Ra. In later times confounded with Horus, the son of Isis, he writes. Confounded. But. What is it about the hawk? The hawk has incredible vision. He flies up into the sky. To the Egyptians, the sky, the sky blue was the color of divinity because it was endless - it is endless. And there's a sense that the sky-blue tilts in the air and goes underground just as rock goes underground. So, at night, it's just like it is now. It's day somewhere in the world. The sky blue is always there. It revolves around the earth like a healing tone. The hawk Horus flies is the sharp eye in the sky, is wrapped in sky, is so high up. All you can see is a dot but out of that dot there's an eye that sees down. Someone estimated once that a hawk has about 50 times the resolving capacity of the human eye. It's like a 50-power telescope attached to your eyes, but a metaphysical hawk whose eye is the sun is a cosmic meditative image which is too large in its resonant significance to be encompassed by the mind. It can be approximated by ordering and plotting of the mind but can only be experienced by a relinquishing of oneself to a harmony with it. It is this moment of grace of being able to open oneself up to the divine.
That was the point of all of the Egyptian religion because you had seen a million combinations. What's one more combination? It eventually becomes meaningless. Eventually, by surfeit one schools oneself not to look in the material world for the divine. After the first million combinations and possibilities, there's no longer any inducement whatsoever to put any combination of material things together. As Plutarch says, even a mountain of emeralds and gold has no soul. And so, the point of Egyptian religion that the Greeks came head on with, with Alexander the Great, was this peculiar obsession that Alexander had. He went out to the Siwa Oasis alone. He left all of his trusted companions, and they were called companions outside of the temple. And he went into the temple of Amun-Ra alone. Spent the night there. And came out convinced that he was the God. It was the Egyptian spirit, in a Greek pridefulness. A Greek individuation. I am the God, said Alexander. Me, not that I am at one with the God - I am the God. And this set the tone for the incredible crash. Because the Greek mind thought that it was domesticating the Egyptians, teaching them to be individuals, teaching them to be rational. And the Egyptians quietly were letting the Greeks be Greeks because that must be the only way that they'll ever understand the Divine. And it never impressed them at all.
Well, next week we'll take a little closer look at the Greek and the Egyptian religion.
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